Take Advantage of Your Spectrum's ROM

ZX Computing

SPECTRUM RULES THE WAVES Every publisher in the UK seems to have discovered the Spectrum, so there is sure to be a bumper crop of reading matter for Spectrum owners in the coming months. Our review panel have been looking at a selection of the Spectrum books and finds that the standard is uniformly high (both in terms of content and presentation), with each book representing value for money in its own way. Take Advantage of your Spectrum's ROM, by David Reidy, is the first booklet looking at the insides of the Spectrum's ROM. It does not claim to be a complete book on the subject, as we have come to expect from Ian Logan, but is rather a taster of useful routines, where to find them and how to use them. It is fairly basic in its packaging and production (handtyped) but this is quite adequate for a quick reference booklet. It covers such topics as where to put machine code on the Spectrum, and how to enter it, and then goes into some depth about several useful routines in the ROM. CHARACTER DISPLAY Keypress detection is discussed, as well as a rather complicated section on displaying characters. We felt, here, that the author's rather complicated method of calculating DF CC was totally unnecessary. There are also various routines to use the BEEP facility, the printer and attributes file. It is not an exhaustive coverage of ROM routines and their uses, but certainly provides a useful resource.